Increasingly, communications between commercial aircraft and air traffic control (ATC) ground stations are carried out through digital media such as Controller-Pilot Data Link Communications (CPDLC) messages. During the course of a commercial air flight, a significant number of lot of messages are exchanged between the aircrew and controllers at the ATC ground stations. These messages may be related to matters such as traffic avoidance or weather avoidance or enhanced route, or other reasons. Many of these messages may be formatted as a concatenated message (CM) meaning that the transmitted message serves as an envelope that carries multiple message elements, each communicating diverse items of information to the flight crew. Such concatenated messages may include both loadable message elements (meaning that the contents of the element may be directly loaded into the aircraft's flight management system) and non-loadable message elements (meaning that the contents of the element describe an action which must be manually performed by the pilot either immediately or at some future point in time). With current ATC messaging systems once a concatenated message is accepted by the pilot, the loadable message elements may be loaded into the flight management system. However, it remains the pilot's responsibility to keep track of actions that must be manually performed as specified in any non-loadable message elements.
For the reasons stated above and for other reasons stated below which will become apparent to those skilled in the art upon reading and understanding the specification, there is a need in the art for alternate systems and methods for processing concatenated datalink messages.